


Deep Waters

by littlewonder



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Alley Sex, Blow Jobs, Drug Use, EMP, Flashbacks, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Inspired By Tumblr, John cares after Sherlock, M/M, Mary is dead, Masturbation, Rosamund Mary is Dead, Sherlock (TV) Season/Series 04 Fix-it, Sherlock is a crack whore, or tries to be
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-28
Updated: 2018-02-28
Packaged: 2019-03-25 02:38:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,812
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13824720
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/littlewonder/pseuds/littlewonder
Summary: At midnight, John comes home to Baker Street to find Sherlock high on the couch. It unlocks a memory a drug addict he ran in with years before he knew Sherlock, only to realise Sherlock was that addict. As he cares for Sherlock, he looks back on that memory and reassesses his entire relationship with Sherlock.





	Deep Waters

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by the [February 2018 prompt for Sherlock Challenge](https://sherlockchallenge.tumblr.com/post/171213675995/sherlockchallenge-welcome-to).
> 
> I've had this idea rattling around in my head for a while, but this gave me the opportunity to finally write it.

His eyes were the same depth, and size and shape, of eyes he’d seen before, so many years ago. They peered out him from out of the darkness, the same as they had done that night, at midnight.

It felt as though they pierced his very soul. Yet they were clouded, far away. John had never known until this very moment that those same eyes were the same eyes of a man he’d once known. But now he saw it, saw Sherlock, as he had looked that night, that midnight of their youth.

John’s eyes adjusted to the dark, and saw that Sherlock was gazing up at him from his position on the couch, just like the first night they met, or so John had thought, thinking as though dreaming, with three patches on his arm.

Only this time, he sensed something altogether more dangerous was streaming through his system, and he rushed to Sherlock’s side, pushing back the coffee table so as to more easily kneel beside him.

“Sherlock…”

A quick examination of him revealed three puncture holes in Sherlock’s wrist, a mirror of those cigarette patches that first night, arranged in a tight triangle over Sherlock’s veins. Each mark was fresh, hours old; each hole was not the same amount of hours old, however.

“Sherlock, can you hear me?”

John looked into those eyes again, which was a mistake. He was enveloped by those eyes, transporting him back to the past, to the moment he had truly first met Sherlock, in a back alley of London in his early adulthood.

John had been still living under the same roof as he father, and had stayed out late that night, riding trains and wandering the streets of London. All of it was to avoid coming home to his father, to his fists and fury. It was a habit he had borrowed from Harry, but unlike her, he avoided the bars. He would not go home drunk and ready for a fight; he would simply slip past his father into his room, if he managed to stay out longer than his father could stay awake.

At midnight, John saw the time and began to head home, but had decided to cut through a back alley on his way back to the station.

John kept his eyes forward on the light shining from the other end of the alley, when he was stopped halfway towards the other end by a hand that grasped his ankle. Jumping at the fear that he was about to be attacked, he looked around and saw no one.

Then he looked down.

There, at his feet, was a slim guy who looked not much younger than he was. He had eyes like black ocean depths that stared up at him. “Please,” he begged, and John was rooted to the spot, watching him. “I need some…”

“Some what…?” John asked.

A voice brought him out of the memory.

“Mary,” said Sherlock, still lying on the couch, “motherhood is slowing you down.”

“Mary?” John repeated. “Oh God,” he breathed, “you know she’s dead, Sherlock…”

It was about time John moved him from the couch to his bedroom. It would be a better place than the living room to rest out his drug trip. “Sherlock, Sherlock,” he told Sherlock, “I’m going to get you up now. Is that alright?”

His eyes connected briefly with John’s before he gave him a noncommital hum.

“I’ll take that as a yes.”

John pulled Sherlock up into a sitting position on the couch, before throwing one of Sherlock’s arms over his shoulders and brought him to his feet. From there, he walked him over to his bedroom and gently let him down onto the bed. He didn’t turn on a light, not wanting to set Sherlock off in any way, and sat down beside him on the bed in order to watch over him until he was able to come out of it.

“Sorry to hear about your daughter,” Sherlock mumbled. “Son.”

“Sherlock,” whispered John, unsure if Sherlock could even hear him. Now Sherlock was talking about his stillborn daughter… and a son? “Sherlock, I never had a son…”

Unless…

John sighed. “God, Sherlock, I don’t see you as a practice baby… You were always so much more than that to me…”

Indeed, John had always loved Sherlock, from the moment he’d met him. Or so he’d thought… but the more he thought about it, the more he realised that the junkie in that alleyway from so many years ago had to have been him, and if that were true, then St. Bartholomew’s Hospital wasn’t the first time they had ever met. And it certainly wasn’t love he felt back then.

But if not love, what would it have been…

Sherlock’s younger self swam before John’s mind, and once again, the memory was playing out again in his mind. If he wanted to remember how he felt back then, he would need to let the whole memory play out again.

“I’m fresh out,” said the younger Sherlock. “I need some… Please tell me you have some…”

“You still haven’t told me… what you want.”

“I just need a little bit. You’ve got a little, haven’t you? I can give you something in return…” And he pulled himself up to his knees by John’s trousers legs. He stared in John’s eyes again.

“What are you --?”

Sherlock started to palm John through his trousers, and it felt good. John had certainly been intimate with girls before, but never had another man touched him like this. It felt so good, and god he wanted this man to touch him more but… he hesitated.

“Don’t you -- ah -- I don’t have what you -- ohh,” moaned John. It could hardly be denied, even for a medical student, what the young man was looking for. He wanted drugs, didn’t he? “I don’t have --“

Now Sherlock had found the outline of him through his clothes, and was cupping and stroking him through them. “Oh god, more…”

As he began to undo the button and zip on John’s jeans, it frightened John to know that what this man wanted wasn’t what John was already fooling himself into thinking he wanted. He didn’t really want to touch John like this, he just wanted drugs from him. And he didn’t even have any, and he’d hate John when he found out…

But now John’s half-hard cock was exposed to the open night air, and there was really going back now…

John gasped as he brought himself back from the memory. What he felt back then… it wasn’t really love, was it? It couldn’t be, not from just being touched like that. It was discovery, that was it. But those eyes, they stirred something in him too, something that wasn’t just discovery. What was it?

He stared down at Sherlock on the bed, and he was still mumbling to himself, still caught up in his current drug trip. John listened to him again, needing to know what was going on in that mind of his, as he checked that Sherlock was still alright and cursing himself for his distraction.

“Who is this?” Sherlock mumbled.

John froze, looking down at him, startled. Was he breaking from his trip?

“Sherlock?” said John.

“Prime Minister?”

“No, it’s John,” replied John.

“Female?”

No, he hadn’t broken through his haze. But his mumblings were clues to what he was thinking about. A female Prime Minister… It could be Teresa May, but given that the previous clues of Sherlock’s thoughts pointed to some time in the past, Margaret Thatcher was more likely.

But Margaret Thatcher hadn’t been Prime Minister hadn’t been in office since before he knew Sherlock. That included the most recently resurfaced memory of that back alley. She had quit office in the early 90s, before they were even adults. But, by the time of that early memory, she certainly had done enough damage. She had contributed to Section 28, which was not repealed until about ten years before they met for the second time in St. Bart’s.

And it was still in place when they first met. It had forced men like John and Sherlock into the shadows. They had been literally in the shadows when John had first met Sherlock, and done things that no one wanted to know about.

That midnight, John had certainly felt pleasure. But there was fear and shame too, emotions that could not be divorced from the act no matter how much forward it was possible that John might go in the future.

And those eyes… there was still another emotion altogether that John attached to them. It wasn’t love… but perhaps it was affection. Affection for a man, for a junkie, he had never before met? No. But it wasn’t pity, it wasn’t anything like that. There are a connection, a magnetic pull. There was something that John had been in denial of, that he’d been running from for so long… But if it was Sherlock after all, perhaps he didn’t need to anymore.

He hated himself for running, now. It was a good memory, one he might finally be able to embrace.

Picking up where he left off, John recalled the way that, at first, Sherlock had sucked his cock one inch at a time, not moving but sucking only at one section at a time. It was fairly obvious that he didn’t do this often, that he didn’t make a habit of trading favours for drugs, and was only doing it now because he was desperate.

In fact, there had been a hungry look in his eyes, on the rare occasion that Sherlock would look up at John. He looked eager… like he wanted this. John had denied it to himself, had told himself that he couldn’t have really looked like that, that he didn’t really want this, that he was trying to get something from John, that was all…

But that look was undeniable. John could barely believe the hunger that he saw there. He looked for excuses to explain away the desire in them; it was his determination for those drugs he thought he was getting, he was thinking of someone else he liked, he was probably literally starving on the streets because he was also homeless. It could’ve been anything, so he had thought at the time.

But what if… What if he was simply hungry for sex? He had faced a lifetime of isolation, forced to hide who he was, and what he wanted, and he was as desperate as John was for this kind of contact.

John wrapped his hands up in Sherlock’s frazzled curls and tried to encourage a backwards and forwards movement, canting his hips slightly into Sherlock’s mouth. Eventually, Sherlock got the hint and started moving.

The sensation escalated as John spread his legs, forcing him to cry out at the feeling. Sherlock bobbed up and down on his cock, and John’s cries grew louder, lewd and shameful in his ears. He raked his fingers through those curls, pressing forward as Sherlock took him deeper and deeper.

Though he tried to treat his partner carefully, Sherlock found his limit and gagged when he attempted to take John too deep. He withdrew to the last position he had felt able, and stimulated the rest of John’s length by gripping it firmly with his hand and stroking.

It was a shame that Sherlock hadn’t been able to swallow his entire length in that gorgeous wet heat, but the sensation flowing through him now were more than enough to get him off, and he was grateful for them.

Eagerly, no longer able to keep him from thrusting into that pretty mouth, he pushed himself deep into Sherlock, chasing orgasm --

“Damn it,” whispered John. “Not the time…”

He looked down at the form that still lay beside him on the bed, still mumbling to himself, lost in his own head, and here was John, lost inside his own head, getting himself worked up. 

John forced his mind away from the old memory, knowing there was nothing more to be gleaned from it. But it was like an unfinished song, calling to him.

He ignored it. It was John’s priority now to watch over Sherlock, listening to his mumblings and waiting for him to eventually come down from his trip.

When he finally slipped from it into sleep, John slipped from the room and into the bathroom.

Eventually, he would have to contact Mycroft and tell him what had happened to Sherlock tonight, but he didn’t want to think of Mycroft right now. There was an unfinished song in the back of his head that begged to be completed.

John ran a shower, and encouraged his deflated cock back into action, recalling what had happened up the last point he had cut himself off, and stepped, naked, into the shower.

The fantasy -- no, the memory -- played out in his mind as he stimulated his cock in parallel to what he imagined -- no, recalled. He closed his eyes and it all came back into his mind, Sherlock’s hand and mouth working him, and John thrusting forward, losing all control left in his body.

John thrust into his own hand as he remembered. Sherlock had struggled for breath, but still managed to suck his cock hard enough that his whole mouth caved in on him. John gave a final cry and came down his throat, and Sherlock swallowed it all down.

Once John had extracted himself from Sherlock, he had barely looked him in the eyes, as he tucked himself back into his pants and fastened up his trousers again.

But he did look. The expectation he found there terrified him, and he dodged around Sherlock and ran away from him.

He ran away.

John felt devastated as he looked around the shower that closed around him. He rested his forehead against his arm as he leaned into the wall. He ran then, and he’d been running ever since.

What if that was the reason Sherlock was using again? What if this was his fault? What if Sherlock had really loved him all along, and John had been ignorant of it all this time? So much time he would’ve wasted!

When he finally stood upright again, John washed away the evidence of his orgasm and then washed himself. He turned off the water and dried himself back off, dressing again into his clothes and then finally climbing the steps back to his room, and dropping off to sleep.

In the morning, he texted instead of called Mycroft, telling him only that he had found Sherlock high the previous night and went downstairs to breakfast.

He smiled when he entered the room and saw two cups of tea already made up. Good old Mrs Hudson. He took up one of the cups and took a sip, then ventured into the kitchen to make something for breakfast.

Now it was only a matter of sitting around and waiting to see which Holmes brother would appear first.

As it happened, it was Mycroft.

“Where is he?” Mycroft simply asked.

“Still in his room, asleep I assume. I’m going to have a word with him when he wakes up, mind you, but don’t you go disturbing him until he does.”

“Unless you’ve seen him awake, I wouldn’t go making any assumptions as to his whereabouts. He could be awake and listening to our conversation right now. He could’ve left Baker Street while you’re enjoying a mediocre breakfast.”

“The night he had, I doubt it,” said John. “But sit down, why don’t you? If you do plan to poke around, I’d like to have a word with you first.”

Mycroft did as John said. “What would you like to know?”

“What makes you think --“

“What else could you want to have a little chat about?” said Mycroft. “You want to know if I knew where he got the drugs? I don’t know everything that goes on in his life.”

“You know some things,” said John. “What I want to know is whether you ever found him in a back alley off Brixton Road. When he was in about his late teens or so?”

“I once found him around there,” said Mycroft. “At around three a.m. How do you know about that?”

“Was begging for drugs?”

“As a matter of fact, he was. I soon put him straight on that and took him home.”

“Took him home where?”

“How do you know any of this?” asked Mycroft.

“Just a feeling I had.”

“John,” said Mycroft, a tone of warning in his voice.

“Are you trying to intimidate me again? Oh, do stop it, we don’t you embarrassing yourself again.”

So instead, he walked from the living room and into Sherlock’s bedroom.

John sipped his tea.


End file.
